Jini™ is an established specification which allows application services to announce their availability dynamically. Users of services can dynamically find an application service using Jini™. Examples can include services providing freight rates, stock quotes, price inventory levels for products or modules (e.g., calculators) for applications. Jini™ operates by registering services, and responding to client inquiries about one of these services. Jini™ also provides proxy code to the client allowing the client to communicate with the services. In this way, Jini™ acts as a broker between the client and the existing services.
Jini™ has been written in a way such that it can only be used by services written in Java™. Many non-Java™ services (“legacy” services), however exist. These services cannot operate through Jini™.